‘But you did it your own way,’ I said, nodding.
‘Yes, I managed to get around the prophecy and save the country. Her prophecy became inaccurate, it became just one more false prediction. It seemed like I’d done well … but then I heard about Fan, and I couldn’t get his story out of my mind. So when I came back to the world, I started looking for him. And I found him.’
‘What’s he doing in Taiwan? Did he flee from the communists?’
‘Of course not. He’s indifferent to human ideology, just as we are. But he was the curator of an imperial museum, you understand? And when the Chinese who weren’t communists started withdrawing to Taiwan in 1948, they took the museum treasures along. And they took Fan with them … what else could he do? So now he works in the Gugun National Imperial Museum.’
‘But that’s in Beijing.’
‘No, that’s just the Gugun Imperial Museum. This is the National one.’
‘But will he tell us everything?’ I asked.
Arina shrugged.
‘Any pressure or force is out of the question,’ I said, just to be quite clear. ‘I’m not going to quarrel with the Chinese Others.’
‘I haven’t gone insane either,’ Arina said with a nod. ‘Only better say “Taiwanese”, and not “Chinese”. It’s more polite and more correct.’
‘Any other pieces of advice?’
‘Perfectly elementary ones. Never raise the subject of the two Chinas in conversation. Praise Taiwan, but don’t abuse China! Even if the subject does come up, avoid offering any opinions. It’s their internal problem and foreigners shouldn’t interfere in it. By the way, you should behave the same way in mainland China, if you end up there.’
‘I get it,’ I said.
‘Refrain from any bodily contact. I don’t mean sex, simply try not to invade their personal space, don’t touch anyone when you talk to them, don’t slap them on the shoulders, don’t hug them. It’s impolite.’
‘You’ve done all your homework,’ I said.
‘What else does an old-age pensioner have to do?’ Arina said, smiling. ‘On the other hand, you can feel quite safe on the streets, the crime rate there is very low. And you can eat anything at all anywhere at all, no matter what the food’s made of. The Taiwanese are very strict when it comes to hygiene. A chef whose hygiene certificate is out of date, or who breaks certain rules, goes to jail for several years. Regardless of whether anyone was poisoned by his cooking or not.’
‘I like that,’ I said, recalling the Moscow kebab stalls where ‘chefs’ in filthy overall coats sliced meat of unknown origin off a revolving grill. ‘How did they manage it?’
‘Harsh dictatorship,’ Arina laughed. ‘You’re a big boy, you ought to understand that punctual transport, public order and safe streets, polite people and good medical services are all the achievements of dictatorship.’
‘Oh, sure. London’s a good example,’ I said sarcastically.
‘Of course. It’s just that in England the period of dictatorship is over already. They don’t enclose the land and drive peasants out of their homes any longer, and they don’t hang children for stealing pocket handkerchiefs. They don’t sell opium to China, using gunboat diplomacy, and get a quarter of the country’s population addicted to it. They don’t loot the colonies for treasures any more. The Brits worked hard for their dictatorship and they earned the right to democracy, tolerance and pluralism.’
‘An interesting view of the world,’ I said.
‘An honest one,’ Arina parried. ‘You know yourself that “a gentleman to the west of Suez is not answerable for what a gentleman does to the east of Suez …” And the Brits aren’t so special. Tell me what you can feel proud of in the history of our own country. Military victories? The annexation of territory? Space flights? Factories and power stations? A mighty army and a world-famous culture? All of it was created under tyrants and dictators, Antoshka! St Petersburg and Baikonur. Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy, nuclear weapons and the Bolshoi Theatre, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Plant and the Baikal-Amur Railway.’
‘Haven’t become a communist in your old age, have you?’ I growled.
‘What for?’ Arina snorted. ‘I’m talking about firm-handed power, harsh power, if necessary. I’m not interested in political posturing.’
‘Then what’s the point of all these achievements, if St Petersburg was built on bones and you couldn’t buy toilet paper in the Soviet Union?’
Arina smiled.
‘It’s the same as with the European colonies in Africa and Asia, the English enclosures that ruined the peasants, the American slaves in the cotton fields … and the never-ending bloody wars all around the planet. First a country gets fat and flourishes – don’t confuse that with the people, it’s the country we’re talking about! Then the rulers mellow a bit, the people relax – and life gets free and easy. The Roman legions no longer march on the orders of Rome, but stagnate somewhere like Judea. The aristocracy devotes itself to its vices, the people to theirs … the only differences are the price of the whores and the types of gastronomical delicacies. And somewhere not far away the numbers of resentful, hungry people bound together by a single, inflexible will are already multiplying, and they regard the former mighty power as a tasty lunch. And then there are two possibilities – either the country will rouse itself and start to live again, even though that will be really tough on the people … or the country will die. And the people with it, of course. It will become a part of the dictatorship that it had left behind and to which it didn’t wish to return. The eternal cycle of strength and weakness, harshness and flabbiness, fanaticism and tolerance. People are lucky if they’re born at the beginning of an age of peace, when an aristocrat can no longer hunt down a commoner with his dogs and the commoner doesn’t yet insist on his right to be an idle drone. That’s what they call a golden age … only it doesn’t last long, not even a century.’
‘And can a society where this balance has been achieved be happy?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ Arina said. ‘Only the balance can’t be achieved for long. I once argued about that with a student in St Petersburg – he was a bright young man. I explained to him that society balances on a razor’s edge. On one side there is inertia, apathy and death, on the other there is harshness, severity and life, and it would be good to walk the path through the middle – but you can’t balance on a razor for long. He didn’t agree, though: he was stubborn and he believed strongly in communism.’
‘Yes, as far as I know, he never did agree,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘All right, Arina, I’m not willing to argue.’
‘You don’t agree either,’ she said, nodding. ‘I understand. It’s youth, Anton. Don’t worry. It’ll pass.’
CHAPTER 6
I HALF-SAT, HALF-LAY on the spacious seat, looking through the plane’s window at the white mantle of clouds and listening to music. I used to have a minidisc player that I crammed all my favourite songs onto. Unfortunately, minidiscs died the death … or rather, they’re in the process of dying out now, having become the exclusive preference of retro types, romantics, skinflints and conservative journalists. Their place has been taken by MP3s, simply files without any external medium. Download what you like from the freebooting piratical expanses of the Internet and listen to your heart’s content …